Live Long and Prosper

State officials double their spending on cheery commercials for Cover Oregon.

Mark Ray leans back in his chair surrounded by wooden
cutouts of rain clouds, birds and a yellow sun. They look as if they
were imagined by the children who carried them in TV ads featuring Laura
Gibson as she stood in a vineyard and sang “Live Long in Oregon.”

The TV spots looked as if they might be advertisements for fabric softener or organic yogurt.

But Ray and his team
at North, the Portland agency that came up with the ads, were selling
insurance—specifically, they were working for the state of Oregon to
draw attention to its new health-care exchange under the Affordable Care
Act.

The ad agency’s
choice of singers and songs was key, but the innocent, even dreamy
images to portray a world under Obamacare have made the spots—and
North—a national phenomenon.

Ray, principal and
executive creative director at North, was well aware that he was doing
the unexpected by ignoring the rancor surrounding health-care reform—an
almost prescient move given the current smackdown over the federal
budget.

“There are a lot of people using fear to talk to people about the Affordable Care Act,” Ray told WW
before the current government shutdown started. “We felt like it would
be the right thing to completely create contrast. What if you think of
the Affordable Care Act as something to celebrate? It’s a simple
thought.”

TAKING HEAT: “It hasn’t hurt at all,” Mark Ray, executive creative director at North, says about conservative backlash to his agency’s ads for Cover Oregon. “All it did was help the cause—and by ‘cause’ I mean the client.”

IMAGE: Chris Hornbecker

Since then, Oregon
officials have doubled down on the ad contract to market their health
insurance exchange, called Cover Oregon. What started as an almost $10
million taxpayer-funded contract with North has expanded to more than
$21 million. State officials say the ad campaign has not yet had the
impact they’d hoped for and want to broaden its reach (see story here).

North is a small
satellite in Portland’s Wieden Kennedy advertising agency orbit. The
firm–with only 30 employees and annual billings of about $25 million—has
clients that include Deschutes Brewery, Columbia Sportswear and Clif
Bar. The firm until now has been best known for hiring Dave Allen, the
former bass player for Gang of Four, as its digital strategist.

The ads have won the attention of The Washington Post and The New York Times.
They have also faced withering attacks, especially from conservatives,
for their feel-good glossing of Obamacare and their lack of any
specifics about what, exactly, the state is trying to sell with all that
public money spent on ads.

The first ad—with
Lost Lander frontman Matt Sheehy—evoked the ghost of Woody Guthrie,
while others touched on hip-hop and a ’60s folk-music, Beatles animation
riff The National Review sardonically labeled “trippy.”

Ray says he
intentionally played against the tension and controversy he was already
seeing in other ad campaigns become self-conscious about the controversy
surrounding Obamacare. “We just said we’re not even going to pay
attention to that,” Ray says.

Ray, 51, lives in
Northeast Portland with his wife, Kristina Day, and their two children.
Born in St. Louis, Ray attended Missouri State University and got his
start at a small St. Louis ad agency (while also launching an
independent music label).

His break came on a
Jack Daniel’s campaign. The smaller firm was bought out by Boston ad
agency giant Arnold Worldwide, and Ray eventually became managing
partner and executive creative director. Under Ray’s direction, Jack
Daniel’s saw significant gains in its international market share and the
campaign won awards, including for its tag line, “Enjoyed in fine
establishments and questionable joints everywhere.”

In 2006, the Portland
ad agency North (formed as Johnson Sheen in 1992) recruited Ray. “If I
was going to continue doing advertising, I just wanted to be back at a
smaller boutique size,” said Ray. “This was an opportunity to own my
shop and be in Portland.”

North pitched state
officials when Oregon sought a way to market the new health-care
exchange launched Oct. 1. The exchange helps match insurers to
Oregonians and employers who want to buy coverage in response to the
Affordable Care Act. The law requires most Americans to be covered by
health insurance by 2014.

Ray and his team saw
the challenge as, first, getting people’s attention and then drawing
them into the mechanics of what Cover Oregon offered.

The first phase, the
“Long Live Oregonians” anthems, were inspired by Woody Guthrie’s 1941
song “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” one in a series the Bonneville Power
Administration commissioned Guthrie to write to build public support for
hydroelectric dams on the river.

“That was very
successful back then,” Ray says of the Guthrie anthems. “The debate was
so heated, and music is such a unifying language, and it would
neutralize the debate.”

The pitch won North
the campaign, beating out seven other agencies for the nearly $10
million deal. In the advertising world, it’s rare for the original pitch
to end up being produced. Ray says it’s happened in his career only a
few times.

The
Cover Oregon version, featuring Sheehy strolling through the state
singing a “This Land Is Your Land” homage (“From Hart Mountain, to the
Skidmore Fountain”), prompted The New York Times to say it looked like a mix ofGuthrie and “something from a tourism bureau.”

The Laura Gibson spot
dialed up the whimsy, with an ad set to an acoustic song with a
background of cutouts of birds, rainbows and a yellow submarine. “I’m a
huge Beatles fan, so we had to slip a reference in,” Ray says. The ad
sparked TheWashington Post headline: “Oregon has just launched the world’s most twee Obamacare marketplace.”

The next
advertisement, by Portland rap group the LifeSavas, was a tone
shift—less like an indie music video and more like a friend’s house
party. Another featured Menomena touring member Dave Depper warbling,
“We fly with our own wings,” while soaring through a cartoon that looked
like a Raffi album cover.

That ad achieved something even more valuable: Republican outrage and the attention that comes with it.

“Dumbest ad ever?” asked Bill O’Reilly’s blog on Sept. 18.

That mockery was part
of the commercial’s viral journey through the conservative
blogosphere—including the conservative blog HotAir and Americans for Tax
Reform—with most posts mentioning the Beatles, LSD and the waste of
taxpayer dollars. (Many pundits also derided the ads for not offering a
single hint of how the marketplace operated.)

State Rep. Dennis
Richardson (R-Central Point), who is traveling the state in an RV
seeking the 2014 GOP nomination for governor, says he hasn’t seen Cover
Oregon’s TV ads but he’s seen lots of the agency’s billboards.

“They are feel-good ads, but they don’t tell people what
Cover Oregon is going to do,” Richardson says. “I don’t think it’s an
effective campaign and they seem to be spending a lot money.”

Told that the
original budget had more than doubled, Richardson, the vice chairman of
the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee, expressed disappointment.

“There’s an attitude
among some people that federal funds are different,” he says. “But if
the ads don’t inform people adequately, I don’t see how they are a
useful expenditure.” (Click here for an article about the ads' effectiveness.)

It’s hard to say how
helpful the online culture warfare is in drawing attention to the Cover
Oregon health-care marketplace. But it is certainly creating buzz for
North. Nothing says you’re hip like catching heat from squares.

“The
kind of buzz North is getting for this campaign is, in part, because
it’s attached to the Affordable Care Act, hence the national press,”
says Jerry Ketel, founder and creative director of Portland ad agency
Leopold Ketel.

“The other reason the
ads are getting buzz is that the work plays to the myth of Portlandia.
It shows the creatives on staff at North are in the moment—always a good
thing for artistic expression, commercial or not.”